Today I thought I’d present two quick stories about ancient high technology. The first comes to us from our friend Jason Martell, the ancient astronaut theorist and Ancient Aliens pundit who once asked his fans to send me hate mail. In his biography appearing on his JasonMartell.com website, I noticed that Martell makes a rather startling claim about his impact on history. The claim concerns the alleged Baghdad battery, a small clay jar that some have speculated might have been used to generate a small electrical current in the Roman era. The poor spelling and punctuation are as given in the original:

Most recently Mr. Martell garnered worldwide attention by recreating a working model of one of science's most profound mysteries - the "Baghdad Battery". Residing in the national museum of Iraq, the discovery of this 2,000 year old device suggests the modern day battery was not invented in 1800 by Count Alassandro Volt, but was in use two millennia earlier. Mr Martell's recreation was instrumental in proving the Baghdad Battery was capable of generating current.

Martell’s “recreation” couldn’t have been instrumental in “proving” anything since Martell was actually recreating earlier recreations dating back to World War II! In 1938 Wilhelm König excavated the small clay jars and speculated that they may have been used in electroplating, though he had no evidence of this. In 1940 William F. M. Gray of General Electric recreated one such jar, filled it with an electrolyte solution, and showed that it could generate a small current. In 1987 W. Jansen published a German-language article (“The battery of the Parthians and the gilding of the Bagdad goldsmiths” (in German), Chem. fur Labor Und Betrieh 38, no. 10 [1987], 528-530 and 533) demonstrating the same thing with a different chemical solution. In 1980, Egyptologist Arne Eggebrecht claimed on Arthur C. Clarke’s Mysterious World to have successfully electroplated a statue using such reproduction batteries in 1978, but mysteriously failed to document the achievement with written or photographic records.

Anyway, the point is that Martell is taking credit for other people’s work and implying he is much more important than he really is.

As I mentioned a few weeks ago, fringe media recently went crazy over a photograph of an alleged Sumerian smartphone that had been circulating on Facebook and ancient astronaut websites since 2012. The craze led to newspapers like The Express and websites like Conspiracy Club and Mysterious Universe to publish credulous articles on the alleged artifact. Now Mysterious Universe writer Paul Seaburn is trying to explain exactly how he fell for so obvious a hoax after the artist who created the clay smartphone in 2012 has confirmed that the supposedly alien object was in fact an objet d’art modeled on an old Ericsson cell phone.

I had traced back the story to a Facebook posting, but was not able to find a working link to the original post. An investigator for Snopes.com was able to do what I couldn’t and found the original Facebook posting that connected the photograph to German sculptor Karl Weingärtner, who makes replica and fantasy objects based on historical models.

“The photo was used without my knowledge and without my consent,” Weingärtner told the Huffington Post this week. “It’s not what I wanted. I do not believe in UFOs and I do not believe in aliens.”

In addition to violating Weingärtner’s copyright, fringe media repeated one another’s claims without even cursory research to attempt to confirm that the object was a legitimately ancient artifact—this despite an absurd backstory that had the object found in the Austrian alps!

Seaburn, who now claims he doubted the story all along, was unapologetic and told the Huffington Post that he simply did not have time to check whether the story was true before telling his readers that the clay phone was likely an alien object. “I think I did the best I could under the circumstances while still trying to get the story up in a timely manner,” he said.

Strangely, I almost agree: I believe that being taken in by a hoax and copying uncritically from bad sources really is the best he could do.

My first reaction when I heard about Martell's claim was, "Why would anyone make a claim like that that can be so easily checked?", but then I remembered no one in the fringe world checks ANYTHING, except the spelling of their own names.

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Clete

1/12/2016 12:20:48 pm

Not true, not true. They check their facts by examining their own alien possessed minds. This takes almost thirty seconds. Then they rush to get this on the web.

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DaveR

1/12/2016 12:52:16 pm

I wonder how many Baghdad batteries you would need to cart around to power your clay cellular phone...

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Only Me

1/12/2016 01:56:30 pm

Obelisks and pyramids, man! Free energy beamed into the atmosphere! Where have you been? ;)

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An Over-Educated Grunt

1/12/2016 04:49:56 pm

Baghdad batteries are so passe. Everyone knows you power your OOPA using unaligned quartz crystals, that's why so many monuments are built out of granite.

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Time Machine

1/12/2016 05:02:52 pm

And the Magna Carta shows that democracy existed during the 13th century.

An Over-Educated Grunt

1/12/2016 07:37:20 pm

Now if only there were a way to harvest the power of stupidity, a resource that had always been with us and in all probability always will be.

Time Machine

1/12/2016 11:31:31 pm

You never stop harvesting stupidity and recycling it here.

Birds of a Feather

1/13/2016 10:40:22 am

It's always cute when tm keeps ranting about himself.

Time Machine

1/13/2016 11:01:10 am

No Christian symbolism on the Arch of Constantine.
In fact, it's debatable how much of the writings attributed to Eusebius are really by Eusebius.

V, 5. All heresies are forbidden by both divine and imperial laws and shall forever cease. If any profane man by his punishable teachings should weaken the concept of God, he shall have the right to know such noxious doctrines only for himself but shall not reveal them to others to their hurt (20 August 379 ).

Birds of a Feather

1/13/2016 01:34:11 pm

It's not nice to call people heretics, tm. I thought your shtick was the French Revolution, now you think you're the Inquisition?

Time Machine

1/13/2016 02:56:05 pm

Nice to see there's a difference between Paul and his Jesus and George Adamski and his Venusian visitor.

Birds of a Feather

1/13/2016 04:55:22 pm

.....Are you talking to yourself now? Seriously, it's predictably hilarious. I could be asking you if you were having a nice day and you'd just start babbling about freemasons or the bible. Or anything that doesn't address the topic at hand.

Time Machine

1/13/2016 08:07:39 pm

GRUNT IS NOT EVEN UNDER-EDUCATED AND YOU ARE SIMPLY BORING. AND IT'S OBVIOUS WHO YOU ARE.

An Over-Educated Grunt

1/14/2016 09:08:22 am

I'm not under-educated? Why thank you, sweetheart.

Funny how you're not a conspiracy theorist, but you insist that someone else, posting completely independently while I'm not even near a computer, must secretly be me, because all I have to do with my life is respond to your inane comments. I didn't even weigh in a few days ago when you announced that white people are just better. If ever there was a low-hanging fruit for me to pick, that was it, but where are my comments on that one? For that matter, which of us has posted as 666/KIF/Nobody Knows/Time Machine, et cetera, and which of us, with the exception of making fun of Phil Gotsch, has posted consistently under one name?

Time Machine

1/14/2016 10:35:49 am

If I am a conspiracy theorist than so are many distinguished academics. All this fucking useless shit throwing "conspiracy theory" at Freemasonry - it's fucking shit.

Only those at the top in society in Western Civilization were Freemasons and nobody else.

There's only YOU who can refer to the death of Roberto Calvi and NOT MENTION P2.

No, I am not a Conspiracy Theorist in exactly the same way a biographer of Adolf Hitler is not a Nazi.

Always need to draw diagrams with you because you lack basic common sense,

Time Machine

1/14/2016 10:38:32 am

It was the Roman Catholic Church that threw dirt at Freemasonry by claiming it was a Jewish Conspiracy planning a New World Order - the Roman Catholics.

Repeat that.

Time Machine

1/14/2016 10:42:12 am

The European Union.

What is that if not a developing fucking New World Order.

America was a Union of States joined together following the War of Independence. What the fuck was that if not a New World Order.

LOL

An Over-Educated Grunt

1/14/2016 11:24:36 am

Now, now, you can't possibly know the Catholic Church started anything, since you don't have a time machine!

Speaking of time machines, what we really need one for is to fast-forward to the end of your posting sprees so that we're spared your "never use one comment when three will do" habits.

Birds of a Feather

1/15/2016 11:13:33 am

"GRUNT IS NOT EVEN UNDER-EDUCATED AND YOU ARE SIMPLY BORING. AND IT'S OBVIOUS WHO YOU ARE."

Lol, you pompous troll, you don't know anything. Grunt has the patience to deconstruct every contradictory statement you make. Me boring? And your random statements strung together one after the other are not? Your complete lack of self-awareness is fairly entertaining, I'll grant you that.

DaveR

1/13/2016 11:23:16 am

Crystals, man, I forgot about the crystals.

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Shane Sullivan

1/12/2016 02:38:27 pm

Fun fact: Jason Martell invented the internet.

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DaveR

1/13/2016 11:24:08 am

I thought Al Gore invented the internet, after serving heroically for 6 months in Viet Nam.

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Ken

1/12/2016 04:46:34 pm

Is there any evidence for electroplated art or anything for that matter from that era?

There is evidence of plating from the time, but it's impossible to say if it was electroplating, because it IS possible to plate chemically. Electroplating is just a hell of a lot faster.

In addition to having read about chemical plating, by the way, I experimented and actually did it in a little science experiment. It takes quite a while, and since I only gave it like a day and only used household chemicals like vinegar, I only got a veeery thin veneer that scratches off easily, but the only possible electricity involved was atmospheric and/or generated by the solution itself.

So while we have some jewelry and so forth from the same time period as the "Baghdad batteries," once the stuff is deposited you can't actually tell HOW it was deposited, so it could have been chemically plated, it could have been electroplated, or it could have been heat-plated, and you just can't tell.

Evidence would have to be found in the form of definitive equipment setups--chemical baths with anodes and cathodes, for instance, or at least places that would have held them.

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Bob Jase

1/13/2016 02:09:25 pm

You'd think that in the almost 80 years since the Bagdad batteries were found someone would have found an appliance or sex toy that they powered by now.

They may sound similar, but Leyden jars are lined inside and out with foil, and the electrode stuck in the lid touches the inside foil. Their materials don't generate electricity, they store it from an outside source, so they are not batteries as we use the term today.

The Baghdad batteries have a roll of copper only on the inside, which, from the illustrations I can find, has little or no contact with the jar. The theory is that they were filled with juice or vinegar and functioned as batteries, generating electricity chemically.

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Dan D'Silva

1/13/2016 10:34:54 am

"have a roll of copper only on the inside"

(and the iron rod as well; I do not know if the iron made contact with the copper)

V

1/13/2016 01:53:40 pm

Hm. Descriptions I can find say that the iron rod was isolated from the copper at the top, but nothing about whether they touched further down at all. And I did not know this before, but apparently there's basically no possibility for this to have been a battery because the copper was completely sealed, which means there was no way to complete a circuit.

Sorry, "battery" enthusiasts, that completely kills even the remotest possibility. No circuit means a battery is useless and you can't even tell that it's making electricity. Basic, basic, BASIC physics.

Time Machine

1/13/2016 08:09:08 pm

V is on kneepads to political correctness.
Reading his stuff is a waste of time.

Birds of a Feather

1/15/2016 12:22:55 pm

Yeah, go ahead and point out where V said ANYTHING to do with political correctness in the above statement.

Eric

1/14/2016 08:51:05 am

Awesome burn at the end! Well Done Jason!

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Tony

1/14/2016 08:13:59 pm

I predict that someday soon it will be discovered that Sargon the Great and his descendants made vast fortunes from being the sole service providers for those Sumerian cellphones, or my name isn't Balulu.

But my friends call me Tony.

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I'm an author and editor who has published on a range of topics, including archaeology, science, and horror fiction. There's more about me in the About Jason tab.